Red Maple

So this is a picture of a Red Maple tree which is one of five or six such trees planted along the walkway from my office to the campus center. I pass by this line of trees probably three or four times a day at the very least, and every day I've been struck by the color of them but never took the time to get a photo until today, and really fall is past prime here... a few more days and these leaves will be on the ground.

I grew up in a very urban neighborhood when I was a kid, and our yard was basically a concrete, blacktop driveway, with a small corner of grass and no trees. When I was 10, the city decided to come in and plant a tree in front of each house in an attempt at neighborhood improvement. The work crew was on the street for a while, tearing up the sidewalks and planting new trees, and I can remember my mom talking to the guys and watching the trees being brought in in the hopes that we would get a red maple as our tree. My mom was super hopeful that we might get lucky, and not get a regular maple or an oak, but get the "fancy" red maple.

We didn't. We got an oak. Someone down the street got a red maple, and my mom was jealous. The red maple in this photo was deliberately planted too, as part of the campus landscape design, but this one doesn't belong to anyone in particular, just to the people who walk by and happen to look up.